Many state-of-the-art wireless multiple access systems exploit multiuser diversity by adaptively scheduling the channel resources to the users that have strong channel conditions. This opportunistic scheduling in combination with adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) facilitates high throughputs in modern wireless access systems. While the above techniques result in a strong effective channel between the base station and the users, which increases the overall system throughput, they incur signaling overhead on the system. This is so because the users must be informed about the scheduling assignments as well as the transmission parameters prior to the actual payload transmission, since otherwise they do not know where to look for payload data, nor how to decode the incoming data. The transmission of the scheduling assignments and the AMC parameters, referred to as control signaling here after, consumes some part of the channel resources that could otherwise be used for payload transmission, which under many operational conditions may be a significant part of the available resources.